One of the primary uses of the Internet is content provision. Content may include any kind of content accessible via the Internet including, for example, textual content items, multimedia content items, etc. Content providers distribute, and sometimes also generate, content items that are made accessible to Internet users (e.g., content consumers). One of the greatest difficulties for users and content providers alike is determining the content items that any particular user is interested in receiving. It is known to address this problem by generating, by and/or for each user, a user profile. The user profile is an indication of the user's specific interests, which may then be matched with specific content items to be provided to the user.
There are two known ways for generating user profiles. In one method, user profiles are generated automatically based on the behavior of the user. For example, if a user visits a web site at which he or she makes a purchase, the kind of object purchased is stored and the user is presumed to have an interest in other things like the ones they have purchased. This indirect method is outside user control and prone to error. For example, a person buying gifts for others would likely be profiled as being a user of the products purchased. The method also fails in terms of what it remembers. A user whose interests change over time can be characterized by a profile based in part on past interests that they have given up.
Another known way to generate user profiles involves allowing the user to select interests from broad categories. In this method, the user selects very general interests (such as in News, Sports, etc), like selecting which newspaper sections they read or TV networks they watch. This approach is user driven, but is not specific. Often this is because of the difficulty of enticing users to make the time commitment necessary to submit detailed information. Further concerns about privacy make some users reluctant to provide more detailed information. Accordingly, the profiles that emerge from this method often do not provide a sufficiently precise guide to the specific information the user would like to receive.